Commentaries

from John Kemp:

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I realise there are a small number of people for whom the weekly US REFINING SUMMARY is not the most compulsive reading material, with a plot line to rival John Grisham and prose that bears comparison with Shakespeare.

Now these are hardly what you might expect as major refinery products. But it is one of the fastest growing parts of the US product inventory.

The inventory of "other oils" has risen by +24.202 million bbl (+18%) in the seven weeks since Apr 10. Other oil stocks (158.600 million bbl) are now +20.500 million bbl (+14.8%) higher than at the same time last year (138.100 million). They are climbing exponentially, up by +3.600 million bbl last week alone.

That amounts to a large amount of extra lube, asphalt, or petchem feedstocks.

So what exactly ARE the refiners producing and presumably storing here?

It also looks rather like refiners have been producing and reporting these "other oils" in a bid to reduce over-production of something else (gasoline? distillate? resid?) amid soft demand.

The implication is that the market is rather more over-supplied with refined products than a simple tally of gasoline and distillate inventories would suggest.